


Artificial Gravity

by LittleGreenBudgie



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Ableism, Abuse, Future AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 02:32:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleGreenBudgie/pseuds/LittleGreenBudgie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m pretty pathetic when it comes to Aradia, to the point where probably only half of what I think about her is even right.  Coworker, best friend, voice of reason, awful excuse for a programming assistant, she’s one hundred sixty-seven centimeters tall and the only person on the ship even halfway tolerable—and I’m including myself with that one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Artificial Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> _I'm a loose bolt of a complete machine_  
>  _What a match, I am half-doomed and you're semisweet_  
>  \-- _Disloyal Order of Water Buffalo_ , Fall Out Boy

                We’re docking in six hours.

                The planet Earth nearly fills my view from the holobubble.  It’s a hunk of rock mostly covered in water, totally lame compared to the swirling toxic atmospheres of gas giants or the shimmering glaciers on far-off moons.  I’m basically as smart as a supercomputer, but I still can’t imagine what it will be like to walk on a planet’s surface again.  Four years aboard a long-haul freighter will do that to a guy.  Fuck sunlight and seasons and humidity; the _Nebula Courier_ has nuclear-powered lights and a thermoregulated titanium hull that keeps the whole ship running smoothly.  It even has this bitching artificial gravity, .93 times the strength of Earth’s, that makes it feel almost like I’m gliding.  What does Earth have on that?

                Well, besides being sort of my home.  Technically.  I spent twenty-two years tied to the ground and feeling like my dysfunctional mutant brain was going to split my skull and leak out of my every orifice.  You see why it’s only technically my home.  I was tossed a chance to haul ass away from that mess, and my bags were packed almost before I finished reading the invitation.  It makes my gut churn to think that I’m returning, even though I know the only thing I’m really returning to is a ball of dirt.  No one signs their life over to space if they have anything worth coming home to.  Most of the crew, twenty thousand strong, left to escape something: a lack of prospects, a failed marriage, a sense of pervasive ennui, whatever.  In this bunch, I’m just one of a couple hundred sad mutants with shitty home lives.

                Of course, for every fucked-up mutie or depressed divorcee, there’s someone who totally missed the memo and can’t wait to land.

                “How are you doing?”

                I roll my eyes, but I spare her my usual snide jibe; I’m pretty pathetic when it comes to Aradia, to the point where probably only half of what I think about her is even right.  Coworker, best friend, voice of reason, awful excuse for a programming assistant, she’s one hundred sixty-seven centimeters tall and the only person on the ship even halfway tolerable—and I’m including myself with that one.

                “Fine, I guess.  Wow, another stupid trip to another stupid planet!  So exciting!” I say.  “Yeah, no.”

                “Sollux!” she exclaims.

                “What?  I’m an interstellar explorer now.  Planets don’t mean shit to me anymore.  Remember how totally fine I was on 16 Cygni Bb?  Yeah.  Just like that.”

                We both know that 16 Cygni Bb is just a colony planet that we visited, not goddamn _Earth_.  Aradia lets it slide, though.  She always does.  It’s fucking stupid that she lets me be so wrong and completely useless, but that’s Aradia for you.  She just rests her hand on my shoulder and stands close beside me.

                “We’re going home,” she says softly.  “Home to cities and prairies and windows instead of holobubbles!  We can go on adventures and see the ruins of the old nuclear reactors when we get back!  I read that they didn’t even have proper filtration units back then, just these weird amazing old things that leaked out radiation.”

                “Seems pretty cool,” I say, turning back to the viewport.  She always knows when I’m not listening, but there’s no point in fighting with her.  Aradia is so stupidly _grounded_ that she can’t begin to understand why I don’t want to go back.  She never has.  She can believe in ghosts and shitty Hasbro Ouija boards and dime-a-dozen doomsday prophecies, but she can’t wrap her mind around disliking something like a planet. 

                “You know, the holobubble is still going to be here when you get back,” she says, frowning.

                “I know,” I say.  That isn’t the problem and we both know it, but I don’t want to get into that whole mess right now.

                I think I knew she was going to find me here before I even decided to come.  Call me an idiot, but I believe in fate, and pushing it along is sometimes kind of my job.  Mostly only to invoke my own doom, but don’t even get me started on that, either.  The point is, Aradia found me by this holobubble when we first boarded so many years ago, so it was only fitting for her to find me before we docked.

                Hell, she did her best to keep me grounded even then.

 

* * *

 

                The _Nebula Courier_ had settled into stable cruising speed when I poked my head out of my room.  I had spent the last couple hours hacking the networks to find the blueprints from the ship, since they didn’t need me up in the navigations room anyway.  I’m basically the best when it comes to computers, so their loss, but I was totally stoked to check out the ship while I could.  I already knew that everyone else was wandering around like idiots, so I hunted down the most obscure holobubble that I could and parked my ass in front of it.  I needed that silence; I had a hobby coding project I was working on, but I was nowhere close to ready, and idiots just made my head hurt even more than it used to on Earth.

                I was settled pretty well into my work when I heard footsteps coming down the hallway.  I hunched more over my screen, pointedly not looking up.  So much for my quiet, secluded viewport.  I hoped for a shining second that the person would leave me alone, but that wasn’t how people worked.  The first week of college was made of random losers poking their heads into everyone’s rooms and bothering any stranger they found.  The first week on a starship wasn’t much different.

                “Hello!” the woman said.  “How are you doing?”

                I glanced up to tell her to buzz off, but I caught myself.  She wasn’t just some dumbass civilian—she wore the same uniform I did, a collared grey thing, although hers conformed to the contours of her body instead of hanging, sacklike, as mine did.  The patch on her breast said MAINT instead of SYS/NAV, so she was lower ranked than me—basically just a space janitor—but she was still part of the crew.  I wasn’t nearly douchey enough to snap at a coworker I’d never met, let alone one who would probably clean the navigations rooms that I worked in.

                It kind of helped that she was pretty, too.  She was short, at least compared to me, with warm brown skin the color of a navigations computer’s copper processing conductors, and her eyes shone black and bright as a galaxy.  She looked Filipino, maybe, but I’d always been shit with ethnicities, so she could’ve been Mexican or Iranian or something.

                She sat on the floor next to me, leaning back against the cool titanium wall and folding her legs under her.  I stared, jaw clenched, and she smiled back.

                “You’ve found quite the view out here,” she said.

                 “The view’s the same at the other holobubbles, you know,” I lisped.  I was conscious of every sibilant I fucked up, waiting tensely to see if she would call me out on it, like people had in grade school.  I turned to stare out the viewport.  “So it isn’t more special than anywhere else.  But it is pretty, I guess.”

                The dark expanse of space stretched on and on and on forever, bigger than anything humanity could ever imagine, bigger than I could ever know a billionth of.  Stars dotted the blackness like zeroes in lines of data far, far away.  I am one hundred eighty centimeters tall and weigh fifty-six kilograms, and I wouldn’t even register as a speck in all that—I had a role among the void, though, one character in a trillion lines of code, and it gave me purpose.  It made me strong.

                “Is this your first time in space?” the maintenance girl asked haltingly.  “I’ve never been farther than my own country before, and I’m beginning to think I’m the only one on board the ship that hasn’t.”

                “No, I’ve been up before this.  It was once, just a suborbital thing, shadowing the helmsman of a passenger shuttle.  He was a shouting angry guy with a real fucked-up brain.  He could hardly get his own food without help, but that guy sure could fly.”

                She didn’t seem surprised by that, but then, a lot of people had some kind of mutation or another—the atomic experimentation back in the ‘20s and ‘30s fucked up nearly half the gene pool. I’m one of the unlucky guys.  I can handle the crippling migraines that bring hot furious tears to my eyes.  Those are secret, something I can keep to myself.  I can’t handle my heterochromatic eyes, left blue and right brown, a visible mark of what I am.  I wondered if the maintenance girl was trying to be sensitive or if she just didn’t care.  Probably the former.  She wasn’t a mutie, at least not that I could tell, so she could’ve gotten away with pushing me around if she wanted to—it wouldn’t be the first time a mutie got the shit beaten out of him, as I knew better than anyone—but she was staying pretty civil.  I was still ready to bolt if she seemed hostile, though, as I always was around normals.

                Instead, she asked, “Did he teach you how to deal with space?”

                I fell quiet, eyes sliding back to the holobubble. 

                “No.  Fuck, no, he didn’t help.  Him or Spaceflight Academy or anyone else that’s been up, no one prepared me for this,” I said.  A faint shiver ran up my spine.  I had been told a thousand times to worry about decompression sickness and adapting to the new gravity, about proper nutrition and exercise, but no one mentioned how space curled up inside you and quieted your neuroses into soft emotional static.  For the first time in forever, I could hear my thoughts without feeling them break against my skull.  It was staggering, overwhelming, completely impossible to adjust to.

                “So it isn’t just me,” she replied, a wobble in her voice.  Her fingers clenched nervously at her knees.  “I think it makes it less frightening to have a companion!  Space is one great adventure, filled with the unknown, but it’s more overwhelming than exciting right now, surrounded by all these stars I don’t know.”

                I fiddled with my glasses, looking out at all of them.

                “Wolf 359.  Luyten 726-8 A.  EZ Aquarii A, B, and C.  Van Maanen’s Star.  GJ 1245 A.  Gleise 687,” I said, pointing one by one to the far-off dots.  “61 Cygni.  Jupiter.  Epsilon Eridani.  Procyon B.  YZ Ceti.”

                “You can’t know all the stars out here!  That isn’t even possible!” she exclaimed, but she smiled, close-lipped and too-wide, and I grinned back.  It was a crooked, toothy, manic thing, I knew, but she didn’t flinch back, so that was good enough in my book.

                “Sure I do.  I’m Sys/Nav, and I took like six classes for my undergrad on these babies.  I’m fucking awful at like half of life, and I’m maybe the worst excuse for a human being ever, but I know these stars, and I know computers.  It’s enough sometimes,” I said.  It was a bit of an exaggeration, since the best supercomputer couldn’t handle a fraction of the universe’s bulk, and my brain didn’t have the benefit of a thousand exabytes of storage, but it was as close as any guy could get.

                Her smile faltered, sputtering off like a keyboard with coffee spilled on it.  She looked at me a long while, and I looked out the holobubble again.

                “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think,” she said finally, clumsily.  “You seem nice to me.”

                “Yeah, sure.”

                  I’m one of a hundred Systems/Navigations experts on board the _Nebula Courier_ , and I’m the biggest asshole out of all of them.  I didn’t say that, but anyone who traded more than a few words with me realized it.  It kind of explained why my only real friend is a foulmouthed wannabe hacker with an even worse temper than me; he’s the only one dumb enough to stick with me more than five minutes.

                Well, except for maybe her—that grin of hers flared back up as if she’d never had a damper put on it in the first place.

                “What’s your name?” she asked.  It was less an inquiry and more a challenge.

                “Sollux,” I muttered, “Sollux Captor.  It’s a fucking awful name for a guy with a lisp, but it’s mine.”

                “I’m Aradia,” she replied, and I nodded.  There were nine Aradias in my secondary school class, and probably a hundred in town.  “Are you from Earth?”

                I hesitated.  I was born in Annapolis, which is a fucking awful city in an Earth state called Maryland, but it wasn’t important.  I wouldn’t be Earthian if I had the choice; hell, it’s half of why I was in space to begin with.  Earth is a shithole.  Earth is a bombed-up dirty wreck built out of pollution and radiation poisoning and monopolies on overpriced lattes.

                “That’s okay.  I’m not one of those Earth natives who hates colonials,” Aradia said.  Her smile faltered again, a desperation song, plain and wild.  I felt a twinge of remorse and almost said straight up what I meant, but she’d probably think I was crazy if I didn’t try to explain.

                “Can you hear the electricity in here?” I asked.  I didn’t need to fall silent to hear it; it was impossible to escape the hum of power throughout the ship, the whirring of hidden fans, the buzz of power cells below my feet.  The entire ship is a hive of metal and captured lightning, and it made my hair stand on end and my heart beat double time in my chest.  “You can’t hear that on Earth, can you?  Here I am, just, just surrounded by stuff that some guys put together with their heads and hands.  Someone like me sat down at a computer and punched out some code, and now it’s keeping us alive as we hurtle through space.  Planets are all doomed to stay how they are, but we can shape our own future in space!  Space is a big blank canvas, only it’s not even, you know?  It’s got the sum total of everything ever in it!  How can your Earth compare to that?”

                Her eyes went wide and wild, the whites showing around her irises, and she laid her hand on my shoulder.  I stiffened.  I knew she could feel me trembling under her hand, and I hated myself for it, hated the way that even the slightest bit of adrenaline made me shake like a small dog.

                “Sollux,” she said, soft and slow.  “Space is the absence of matter.  You’re from a planet, the same as I am, aren’t you?  Earth is where humankind originated.  All that you’re talking about is possible because of Earth, you know?  I’m from Texas.  Have you ever been to Texas?  The hot sun blazes down on it and bakes the ground into cracks on the riverbed, and you can pull up big slabs of it.  I used to get in mud fights with the other kids when I was little.  Now, I can dig through history and archaeology and find old American artifacts.  Can you even imagine Texas being part of someone else’s country?”

                “Sure, I’ve been to Texas,” I muttered, shoulders slumping.  The energy drained out of me all at once and I wound down like an unplugged machine.  “Houston, once.  That’s where we got onthe _Nebula Courier_ , but you already know that.  I didn’t stop to smell the roses or anything.”

                “Houston’s beautiful in its own way, though, don’t you think?” she said, still talking real quietly.  “Cities are nice and manmade, just the way you like them, right, Sollux?”

                I arched an eyebrow incredulously, and she flashed a smile.  It was weird to hear her talking like I’d grown up with her, and weirder still since my actual childhood friend uses “fuckass” as a term of endearment.  Karkat is a mutie like me, though the asshole pretends he’s not.  His blood is messed up almost worse than my brain is, and it’s a freaky lime green color, like nuclear fallout or something.

                “If you think about it, skyscrapers bring you just that bit closer to space than you might be otherwise,” she continued.

                I cracked, letting out a dry chuckle.

                “Yeah, okay, you got me.  I like cities.  Cities fucking rock.  Cities are the best things on Earth. Cities are made of connectivity and wonder, so yeah, you win.  Earth one, Sollux zero.”

                I decided then that I liked her.  She had fight without being a dickbag, and that made her better than everyone in my home town.  Annapolis was a hive of jerks and burnouts, and I didn’t think the rest of Earth was much different, just a bunch of assholes tied together by their hatred of something.  A long time ago, people would lynch each other for religion and skin color.  Nowadays it’s whether you’re a colonial or a mutant or whatever.  New characters, same story.

 

* * *

 

                Aradia rests her chin on my shoulder and stares out the holobubble with me, watching the blue-and-white swirl of Earth.  It’s getting closer faster than I’m strictly comfortable with.

                “You’re right.  I am nervous about docking,” I say after a long while. 

                Aradia nods as if unsurprised.

                “You don’t need to be.  It’ll be nice to have soil beneath our feet,” she replies with a sigh.  “I’ll have to show you all the best parts of Texas.  My favorite is in the countryside, a couple hours out of Houston.  My car is a ways out of town, but that won’t be too big a problem, and then we can head out….”

                Soil.  Countryside.  Car.  I look at Aradia, wondering if Earth life ever really left her.  Before taking this job, she had never been off planet before; she is an Earth native through and through, descended from Earth natives who hadn’t even left the country in generations.  Earth soil has been ground into the whorls of her feet, and dust coats the insides of her lungs.  She says her skin is the color of the earth, her eyes shale-dark, her hair a tangled coil of black Texan oil.  More than being Texan, though, she is Earthian.

                I’m starshipian.  _Nebula Courier_ -ese.  I have pale stardust skin that looks a little sallow under the fluorescent lighting and dark hair like a sliver of space.  Going back to Earth is like emigrating from home all over again.  Going back to Earth is giving the atmosphere a free pass to fuck my asthmatic lungs up, drop me into a coughing fit, keep me unable to catch my breath.  Going back to Earth is going back to a world where muties like me are second-rate citizens.  Captain Peixes keeps a tight ship now, cracking down hard on prejudiced dicks, but fuck if anyone on Earth is going to care about our sort.

                “Sollux?” Aradia asks worriedly.

                “Hm?  Yeah, that sounds good,” I say, unease clawing up my throat.  I can’t breathe right on Earth.  I can’t think right on Earth.  Hell, people don’t even think a mutie like me can live right on Earth, and aren’t they right?  Even if they’re half the reason it’s that way, aren’t they fucking right?  How many mutie kids don’t make it past childhood?  Disabled kids, kids with cancer so bad that it can’t be fixed, or even cosmetically-different kids put down for being different…How many muties actually thrive on Earth?

                “I know you weren’t really listening,” Aradia  says, shaking her head.  “It’s okay, though.  Think of all the adventure that we’ll find when we get back!  There are bound to be a ton of changes to the city, and you never even really saw it to begin with, and we can hit up the countryside and everything, too!”

                “Aradia.  Aradia, fuck, get it through your head, I don’t want to,” I say in a half-panic.  “I don’t want to go to Earth, I don’t want to see your stupid fucking cities, I don’t want to choke on my own lungs breathing that shitty fucking atmosphere.  I don’t want anything to do with Earth.  You’ve known me for four fucking years and you still think I want to see an inch of your cancer-seeped disaster zone?”

                She pulls back like I struck her, her shoulders slumping something awful. I take off my glasses and clean them on my shirt as I turn to face her.  She’s a pleasant brown-and-grey blur without them, so I don’t have to see her face, and I can scowl without repercussions.

                “…You don’t mean that,” she says.

                “Fuck yes, I do,” I mutter. 

                “No, you don’t.  Do you know why?”

                “Why?” I demand, hot and miserable, sweat starting to bead on the back of my neck.

                “Because Earth has Starbucks.  Earth has Applesoft stores.  On Earth, you can get a fresh-brewed cup of coffee without having it synthesized.   You can have real milk in it, even, if you want, and it won’t cost you anything more than pocket change from the salary you’ve racked up.  You can buy the latest gaming modules and update your pieces of hardware with the newest tech.  Do you really want to stay up here, working on second-rate systems and drinking burnt synth coffee?”

                “Yes,” I mutter stubbornly.  “My brain tries to destroy itself when I’m on the planet.  My eyes are fucked up so badly I can hardly see, never mind the stupid-ass bicolor thing.  That’s Earth radiation in my DNA.  Earth doesn’t want muties, and I don’t want it.”

                I glare at her, forcing Aradia to take notice of my bizarre blue-brown eyes and maybe accept that I’m right.  She’s never said a word about them in the years that I’ve known here, but she owes it to me to comment.

                She hugs me instead.  My spindly body fits easily in her strong arms, and I rest my bony chin on the top of her head.  I shiver.  Aradia is warm as a nuclear reactor and holds me so tightly I don’t even think of trying to pull back.  She strokes slow circles on my back, and I take a deep, shuddery breath.  Maybe it’s the last good breath I’ll have until I’m back in the safe artificial atmosphere of the _Nebula Courier_. 

                “Sollux Captor,” she says, and I stiffen.  She has never used my full name.  “Do you really think people are going to hurt you?”

                “…Maybe not today, but fuck, I’m not a kid anymore.  No one’s going to pull any punches,” I say.  “There was this one guy, big swaggering rich douchebag back at home, right.  Dressed like a fucking greaser and thought his role was to ‘teach muties their place.’  Kid was sixteen and he was a fucking sociopath already, that’s how things were in Maryland.  He tried to pick on me when I was thirteen and my big brother stepped in to stop him.  Mituna isn’t much bigger than I am, and he’s got the same mutant eyes.”

                Aradia goes silent, squeezing me tighter.

                “The other guy knocked him down and kicked him in the head until he passed out.  Mituna…He’s broken now.  That fucking asshole beat Mituna until he couldn’t even function properly on his own.  He can’t even talk right anymore…I just…I wish…I want…fuck…” I splutter.  It’s been so long that I can’t even manage tears, just a hollow, burnt-out rage that tiredly rears its head in my chest.

                “I won’t let anyone lay a finger on you,” Aradia says quietly.  “I’ll be with you the whole time we’re there, if you want, and I won’t let anyone give you trouble.”

                “Yeah?” I reply.  I can’t bring myself to be sarcastic, but the idea of soft, smiling Aradia—Aradia, who can’t even tame her tangled mane of hair—standing up to anyone is ridiculous.

                I pull back and look back out the holobubble again.  No, it’s a nice sentiment, but Earth is a shitstain even without asshole normals.  It’s not secure and predictable like the _Nebula Courier_.  Earth isn’t made of blueprint corridors and carbon nanotubes and titanium hulls.

                It’s easier to think about the starship than Mituna, anyway.

                “You’ll be okay,” Aradia says again, but it’s more hesitant this time.  She doesn’t try to scoop me back into a hug, and half of me is grateful for it.  The rest misses the brief feeling of security, but I think of stardust and asteroids and let it pass.

                “I have to get off when we dock, anyway,” I reply.  “We’re all required even if we don’t fucking want to.  So it’s not even like I get half a choice in what I do.”

                “No, but you can choose what to make of it.  I mean, if you don’t want to go on an adventure, you can always just have a quiet two months away from all that,” she says.  Her cheeks flush darker, and I pause.  “You can stay with me, if you want.”

                “Look, I’ve got enough salary to easily get a stupid hotel or something.  I know you feel bad about Mituna, but…”

                She heaves a heavy sigh and shakes her head.

                “For a genius, you’re not actually that bright sometimes, silly,” she says.  “I meant to ask you before we got this close, but you never wanted to talk about Earth or anything when I brought it up!  Honestly, you’re so afraid of adventure and nature that I’m surprised you don’t live in an electrical closet!”

                I scowl, but Aradia cuts me off before I can speak.

                “I know you don’t want to go back to Earth, so I thought staying with me might make it easier.  It’ll be just like being on the _Nebula Courier_ , only with better food and natural sunlight.  We can even get one of those starship sound simulators that can make the same whirry electrical noises that you’re used to and everything.  You won’t even know you’re on Earth,” she says.  I know that’s not true, but she’s smiling so, so widely.  I manage a stuttery, jerky nod.

                “Okay.  I’ll stay with you, if you really don’t mind.”

                She slips her hand into mine and stares out the holobubble with me as the planet draws closer and closer into view.  The vast expanse of space that we’ve explored is far behind us; ahead is the familiar—for her, at least—and the final frontier for me.

                She grounds me even now, but I can’t bring myself to be angry.

 


End file.
